Carnival

Tuesday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The secret child: Love Forms, by Claire Adam, reviewed

Claire Adam’s compelling first novel Golden Child won the 2009 Desmond Elliot Prize and was also picked as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped Our World’. It told the story of contrasting twins in Trinidad – one an academic high-flyer, the other a misfit. When the latter is kidnapped, the father must act to rescue the son he has never quite understood. Adam has followed this with an ostensibly quieter novel about a Trinidadian woman called Dawn, divorced with two adult sons, who lives in south London and works for an estate agent, after abandoning her medical career. She decides to search for the baby girl she gave

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Calm down about the Notting Hill Carnival

There was recently a mass public party at which all sorts of offences were committed. As innocent attendees cut loose and jived, shadier actors took advantage. There was a burglary, a robbery, 19 drug offences, 26 acts of theft and no fewer than 30 acts of violence against individuals. There were also two sexual offences – shameful. What hell was this? Where did all this moral abasement occur? Must have been at the Notting Hill Carnival, right? Actually, no – it was at Glastonbury. Yes, at this year’s Glasto, famously the hangout of middle-class white folk who like rock, crimes were committed. In those tent cities, amid the thick haze